'Plastic Fantastic' at Mass MoCA: Making art out of thin air

NORTH ADAMS -- Lee Boroson creates landscapes of thin air. His work is more about fog and smoke, water and fire than mountain vistas, urban views or pastoral scenery.

His new four-part installation at Mass MoCA, "Plastic Fantastic," gives shape to these elemental forces through a combination of translucent draperies, sheer plastic, cascading spheres, fabric inflatables and lava-lamp lookalikes.

Combined, the Brooklyn-based artist said they offer a multisensory experience of being outdoors while also referring to the installation's architectural, cultural and environmental setting.

"The tradition of landscape [art] gives you everything all assembled for you," he said in an interview last week. "This is a more direct [and serial] experience of nature, like hiking a trail."

Visitors entering the museum's massive Gallery 5 will first encounter "Moisture Content," a galaxy of suspended, honeycomb-surfaced, white globes, fronting a circular maze of sheer and translucent hanging curtains meant to suggest a disorienting fog.

Emerging from that maze, they move on to "Deep Current," a Niagara Falls-inspired, periodic cascade of white-and-silver spheres falling from the ceiling into the center of a railed viewing platform.

Despite its history of industrial uses to generate electricity, fallen rock removal and nightly light shows to sustain tourism, the falls is still considered a prime natural site, Boroson said.

Those kinds of associations, architectural and historical, are often calculated into Boroson's work, although he says viewers needn't be aware of them to appreciate his art.

"I don't feel that strong about a specific takeaway," he said.

The two final episodes of the installation are similarly based on "natural" models, but ones that carry violent and dangerous associations.

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'Plastic Fantastic' at Mass MoCA: Making art out of thin air